Happy Birthday, Faithful Departed!

For official purposes, The Faithful Departed was published one year ago today. After a year, and now into its second printing, I'm happy to report that my book is still selling well, still having an impact.
In one of the earliest reviews (appearing even before the official publication date), the late Father Richard John Neuhaus offered a few friendly criticisms but concluded with the generous observation:

The Faithful Departed is the best book-length treatment of the sex abuse crisis, its origins and larger implications, published to date.

Writing for Inside Catholic, John Zmirak went much further, calling it…

…the most important work about the Church to appear in the last two decades…

Not everyone has enjoyed the book. In Religion and Liberty, Kevin Schmiesing pinpointed the reason:

American Catholics and their bishops have not yet learned the lesson, Lawler thinks, and the evidence is with him.

Exactly. Even at this late date, all too many Catholic leaders would prefer not to confront the tough issues. The Faithful Departed has been quietly taken down from the shelves in many Catholic bookstores, presumably after calls from local chancery offices. In one less quiet episode, my speaking appearance at the Catholic University bookstore was cancelled.
Still the word is getting out. My calendar still shows several speaking dates that remain from the burst of invitations that came after the book's publication. (And there's room for more; if you have a group that might be interested, please let me know!) More and more Catholics-- and sympathetic non-Catholics-- realize that while it's sometimes painful to combat an infection, it's deadly to let the infection spread. As George Weigel put it:

Many Catholics understandably want to put the Long Lent of 2002 behind us. No one should do so without reading The Faithful Departed.

Too grim? Alas, the evidence suggests otherwise

As many readers have observed, The Faithful Departed is not a cheery book. Several reviewers have said that the book's chief flaw lies in my failure to indicate how we can move forward from here: how we can restore the vitality of the faith and recover a genuinely Catholic culture. I can accept that criticism as valid. I plan to spend the next several years in an effort to plot out that road forward, and invite loyal Catholics to join me in traveling it. (For details, watch the Catholic Culture site.)

In a friendly and perceptive review that appears in the November issue of New Oxford Review, Dan Flaherty makes that same criticism. OK; I'll cop a plea: Guilty as charged. I hope the court will agree to a sentence of "community service," because that's what I plan anyway.

But I'm afraid I'll have to pour cold water on another part of Flaherty's review, in which he suggests that I take an unduly grim view of Massachusetts history. The key paragraph involves my coverage of the local response to the Roe v. Wade decision. Let me take it in three sections:

In a previous generation, Mayor Curley would have immediately denounced the decision and any wayward Democrats would have fallen in line behind Cardinal O'Connell.

True. Mayor Curley and Cardinal O'Connell might not have cooperated-- they rarely did; their relationship was frosty-- but they would have worked separately toward the same end.

Here though, Lawler does overlook evidence that all was not lost in the early 1970s. Tip O'Neill, after some initial waffling on Roe, fell into line after a scolding from the clergy, and went on to compile a solidly prolife voting record until his retirement in 1987.

Technically true but thoroughly misleading-- at least for the purposes of my analysis. Tip O'Neill did everything in his considerable power to ensure that the House of Representatives never held a vote on any effort to ban abortion. Yes, he retained a pro-life record. And he made it possible for dozens of other Democrats to retain their pro-life credentials without lifting a finger to stop the slaughter of the unborn. My argument is that Catholics did not resist the decision; Tip O'Neill, alas, is a case in point.

It is impossible to imagine former Speaker of the House John W. McCormack, a man from Irish Boston and a devout Catholic who'd just retired before Roe, ever choosing Planned Parenthood over Holy Mother Church.

Absolutely true. But notice: McCormack was no longer on the scene as an active politician when the roof caved in during the 1970s.

The disease is contagious

Yesterday 53% of the American Catholics who voted in the presidential election cast their ballots for Barack Obama: the most radical pro-abortion candidate ever to win a major-party nomination.

But wait: According to those exit polls, John McCain won a majority among those Catholics who attend Mass each week-- that is, the active Catholics.

What lesson can we learn from the voting? I think it's simple: The people who have stopped paying attention to Church teaching on other issues have, not surprisingly, stopped paying attention to Church teaching on abortion as well. Why should we expect otherwise?

In other words, when Catholics stop acting as Catholics, and praying as Catholics, and thinking as Catholics, they will inevitably stop voting as Catholics, too. Does that theory sound familiar? It's the main theme of The Faithful Departed, of course.

I've made this same argument in a bit more detail over on the Catholic Culture site.

Election Day

It's election day. We're hanging on by a thread in this country to whatever cultural stability we have left. We've fought for so long against a nebulous enemy and on so many fronts.

What's on the mind of many faithful Christians is that when we seemed to be gaining...not victory by any means, but perhaps some measure of ground -- we will suffer today a loss that will set us right back to the beginning: right back to the late sixties and the ascendancy of the destructive socialist mindset.

Homosexual activists are very much involved in this destructive process. Somehow they've gotten a lock on the family and the priesthood, the cornerstones of society. They won't let go.

In The Faithful Departed Phil shows how homosexuals rose to the top in the Church, and he shows how compromising their influence has been. They are still very much in control, conditioning every relationship for the worse.

As discouraged as I am over the secular matters of the day, and as frustrated as I get when I see people acting as if the scandal is over, there are signs of hope -- hope that I believe has been nurtured by Phil's work.

Today on the Catholic World News site you will see a story about a Vatican official's explanation of why even celibate homosexuals cannot be ordained to the priesthood. This teaching is hopeful in its delicacy and careful affirmation of what is so needed today: a strong faith in the true nature of the priesthood as a spiritual fatherhood, one which mirrors the love of God the Father.

‘He can even be without sin. But if he has this deeply seated tendency, he cannot be admitted to priestly ministry precisely because of the nature of the priesthood, in which a spiritual paternity is carried out. Here we are not talking about whether he commits sins, but whether this deeply rooted tendency remains.

I give thanks for this teaching and hope and pray that it will help heal today's challenge, and the challenge of every day as we continue to battle for the truth.

plain brown wrapper?

It's happened again. A friend of a friend-- we'll call him Mr. A-- asked about The Faithful Departed in a Catholic bookstore, and was told the store didn't carry the book. When Mr. A asked why, the sales clerk replied quite honestly that his boss didn't want to cause any trouble with his bishop.

Mr. A persisted a bit, telling the clerk that he'd heard good things about my book. At that point the clerk, after glancing over his shoulder, leaned over the counter and said that he'd read the book, liked the book, and just happened to have a copy available for sale-- not on the shelves, but right there under the counter.

So Mr. A got his copy, the bookstore got its sale, and I'll get my commission. Everybody's happy, right?

Yet I can't help thinking that something is wrong-- yes, even morally wrong-- when a store sells a book that it won't allow on display.

(I don't want to identify the bookstore, because I don't want to cause trouble for the clerk. It was not the National Shrine bookstore-- where the same sort of thing was happening a few months ago-- but it was a store located in a major East Coast city.)

Catholic University newspaper picks up story of Shunning at the Shrine

I myself never really made a connection between the fact that our daughter attends Catholic University and the banning of Phil's book. I thought of the Shrine bookstore as a separate entity from the University, to tell you the truth.

But Elizabeth Grden, author of an article appearing in the Oct. 5 edition of The Tower, the student-run newspaper on campus, thought there was a connection, and her piece has a couple of quotes from Deirdre. According to Deirdre, Elizabeth thought it was a bit embarrassing on the part of the school.

As Phil says, the bookstore can carry whichever books it likes. It's an interesting question, though -- what constitutes building up the solution to the terrible problem of sex abuse in the Church, and what is detrimental, preventing true healing from taking place?

And another question. Is this what's really bothering the administration of the Shrine?

It just seems like common sense to me that if you want to know what causes a problem, you must do more than a) bandy about superficial explanations and b) put on a happy face. Everything I had read on this terrible topic left me with an uneasy feeling -- that feeling you get when you just know that the real issues are being hidden.

On the one hand, the liberal media promoted their own agenda by claiming that the problem was due to priestly celibacy. Well, that can't be true -- priests have been celibate in the West for centuries, and while this problem comes and goes, it hasn't been endemic by any means, and has never been so much a fabric of Church life as it is now.

On the other, conservatives alternated between two ideas. Some claimed a media conspiracy, which would truly be a feat -- neither Phil nor I can have a conversation about the Scandal without someone telling us that they know someone abused by a priest. The Boston Globe isn't behind that.

Some strong Catholics attribute it to a breakdown in doctrine. This latter explanation can't be the whole story -- so many of the perpetrators and their bishops were considered among the most conservative or orthodox among us. Whole Traditionalist and conservative movements were disbanded or compromised because of this problem.

I remember very well a good friend telling me a decade ago that she was convinced that the liberals were out to get Fr. Geoghan because of his liturgical rectitude.

Well, Geoghan turned out to be one of the worst, a man who molested hundreds of children right under their parents' noses. Cardinal Law was always called one of the most conservative bishops (I wouldn't agree), yet he is the most disgraced for his stunning refusal to deal with even the most brazen examples that flounced their way across his diocese. (You can read about examples in Phil's book -- you will be beside yourself with anger!)

Only Phil's book gets at the root of the problem and brings about what one friend termed "a catharsis" (I'll try to get her letter to post here -- it's masterful). Only Phil's book explores the breakdown in authority by the bishops and the abdication of religious and ascetic practice.

Think about it: you can believe what you want, but it's how you act that really lends conviction to your beliefs. And right action takes quite a bit of practice; practice in denial of self. Have the bishops been practicing this denial? Have the priests? Do we find the means to teach them denial in the seminaries?

These are the questions that The Faithful Departed answers. And these are the answers that will bring true healing.

To take the other option, namely, putting on a happy face, well, it can be done. I suspect in the Curious Case of the Shunning at the Shrine the higher ups want to use "healing" as an excuse to run away from the surgeon's knife as fast as they can!

Fancy Nancy, Writer Ordinaire

I had heard that Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi had written a book and it was basically bombing- this in spite of the fact that her PR team was working overtime to promote it. She was on TV, radio and there was actually print advertising.

It wasn't even banned from bookstores.

I checked today to see how bad, bad was and found that the book: "Know your Power: A Message to America's Daughters" is Amazon ranked #83,999.

Phil's book, "The Faithful Departed" is ranked at #31,951. (not his finest showing, that was in the #2K range)

Nancy Pelosi's book has received an average of 1.5 stars.

Phil's book has received an average of 4.5 stars.

Now I'm not surprised by these statistics, especially after seeing how dreadfully Ms. Pelosi has performed as Speaker of the House. In fact I bet she is just as good a writer as she is Speaker, something right around 1.5 stars.

So contrast that to Phil who while very well known in that state of Massachusetts and D.C. does not have the PR machine (as evidenced by this blog)and had book signings canceled and the book banned has far exceeded the woeful 1.5 rating. And his book sales have far outpaced Ms. Pelosi's sad showing.

So if you have a choice between buying Ms. Pelosi's book and Phil's book, I hope you will make the right choice.